How to Request Payments with Stripe Checkout and Google Sheets

Stripe payment links make it easy for you to accept credit card payments from customers anywhere in the world without even having a website. You can use the Stripe dashboard to generate payment links and then send the links over email, WhatsApp, SMS, or share them on your social media pages.

A limitation of Stripe Payment links is that you can only generate them manually. Stripe has a feature-rich API but it doesn’t allow you to generate payment links automatically.

Stripe Payment Link Generator

If you are looking to generate custom payment links for Stripe in bulk and send them to your customers, you can consider using Stripe Checkout. These are payment forms hosted on the Stripe website and allow you to collect only payments your customers.

It is important to note that Stripe Checkout sessions will automatically expire after 24 hours. As an alternative, you can use the Stripe API to generate invoices and email the invoice link to your customers.

Generate Stripe Checkout Links with Google Sheets

To get started, open your Stripe dashboard, go to Developers > API Keys > Created restricted API key.

Give your key a descriptive name, choose the Write permission under Checkout Sessions and click Create key.

Next, make a copy of the Stripe Google Sheet in your Google Drive. Go to Tools > Script Editor and replace the Stripe API Key with the key generated in the previous step. Then, click on the Run menu once to authorize the script with your Google Account.

Switch to the Google Sheet and you can now use the custom Google Sheets function STRIPE() to generate Stripe Checkout sessions for accepting online payments.

If you would like to generate payment links for multiple rows in the Google Sheet, just write the formula in the first row and drag the crosshairs to the other rows as show in the demo below. Array Formulas are not supported yet.

How Stripe Checkout Works with Google Sheets

If you are curious to know how integration of Google Sheets and Stripe works, the answer is Google Apps Script. The underlying code invokes the Stripe API with your secret API key and writes the generated checkout session links in the Google Sheet.

The custom Google Sheets function uses the built-in caching service of Apps Script to reduce latency and improve performance. The code can be extended to accept recurring payments for subscriptions.

/**
 *
 *  Author  Amit Agarwal
 *  Email   amit@labnol.org
 *  Web     https://digitalinspiration.com/
 *
 **/

const STRIPE_API_KEY = "<< Stripe API Key >>";
const STRIPE_SUCCESS_URL = "https://digitalinspiration.com";
const STRIPE_CANCEL_URL = "https://digitalinspiration.com";

/**
 * Generate Stripe payment links in Google Sheets
 *
 * @param {number} amount The amount to be paid using Stripe
 * @param {string} currency The 3-letter currency code (optional)
 * @param {string} description A short description of the item name (optional)
 * @return Stripe checkout session link
 * @customfunction
 */

const STRIPE = (amount, currency, description) => {
  const input = {
    "line_items[0][price_data][currency]": currency || "USD",
    "line_items[0][price_data][product_data][name]": description || "Name",
    "line_items[0][price_data][unit_amount]": Math.ceil(amount * 100),
    "line_items[0][quantity]": 1,
  };

  const cacheKey = JSON.stringify(input);

  const cachedLink = CacheService.getScriptCache().get(cacheKey);

  if (cachedLink) return cachedLink;

  const params = {
    cancel_url: STRIPE_CANCEL_URL,
    success_url: STRIPE_SUCCESS_URL,
    mode: "payment",
    billing_address_collection: "required",
    "payment_method_types[]": "card",
    ...input,
  };

  const payload = Object.entries(params)
    .map(([key, value]) =>
      [encodeURIComponent(key), encodeURIComponent(value)].join("=")
    )
    .join("&");

  const response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(
    "https://api.stripe.com/v1/checkout/sessions",
    {
      method: "POST",
      headers: {
        Authorization: `Bearer ${STRIPE_API_KEY}`,
        "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
      },
      payload,
      muteHttpExceptions: true,
    }
  );

  const { url, error } = JSON.parse(response);

  if (url) {
    CacheService.getScriptCache().put(cacheKey, url, 21600);
  }

  return error ? error.message : url;
};

You can use Mail Merge with Gmail to request online payments from your customers over email. You may also use Document Studio to create PDF invoices and embed the payment links directly in the customer’s invoice.

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